Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
alive and intelligent, as so sensitive to one's presence, that one had to be careful not
to offend or insult the very land itself. Thus, most indigenous cultures have known the
Earth to be alive—a vast sentient presence honoured as a nurturing and sometimes harsh
mother or grandmother. For such peoples, even the ground underfoot was a repository
of divine power and intelligence.
These non-Western peoples espoused an
animistic
perspective, believing that the
whole of nature is, in the profound words of 'geologian' Father Thomas Berry,
“a com-
munion of subjects rather than a collection of objects
”. Animism has traditionally been
considered backward and lacking in objective validity by Western scholars, but today
philosophers, psychologists and scientists in our culture are beginning to realise that an-
imistic peoples, far from being 'primitive', have been living a reality which holds many
important insights for our own relationships with each other and with the Earth. One
such insight is that animistic perception is archetypal, ancient, and primordial; that the
human organism is inherently predisposed to seeing nature as alive and full of soul, and
that we repress this fundamental mode of perception at the expense of our own health,
and that of the natural world.
Psychologists involved in the study of child development recognise that children pass
through an animistic phase in their early years, during which they relate to objects as if
they had a character and as if they were alive—evidence consistent with my argument
for the primacy of animism. But tragically, these same psychologists hold that this an-
imistic phase is only appropriate to early childhood, and that one must help children to
realise as quickly and painlessly as possible that they live in a dead world in which the
only experiencing entities are other humans. However, not all psychologists subscribe to
this view. James Hillman, a close student of Jung and the founder of Archetypal Psycho-
logy, suggests that animism is not, as is often believed, a projection of human feelings
onto inanimate matter; but that the things of the world project upon
us
their own 'ideas
and demands', that indeed any phenomenon has the capacity to come alive and to deeply
inform us through our interaction with it, as long as we are free of an overly objectifying
attitude. Hillman points to the danger of identifying interiority with only human subject-
ive experience; a gaping construction site, for example, or a clear-cut mountainside, may
communicate the genuine, objective suffering of the Earth, and one's sensing of this is
not merely a dream-like symbol of some inner process which relates only to one's own
private inner self.
This animistic perspective has a long and distinguished philosophical pedigree. For
some eminent philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, and more recently Alfred
North Whitehead, it was inconceivable that sentience (subjective consciousness) could
ever emerge or evolve from wholly insentient (objective, physical) matter, for to propose
this would be to believe in a fundamental division or inconsistency within the very fabric
